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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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It is the time
of year when we long for change. As I write this, I look out the window at snow
swirling around in mini-tornados, caught in the nooks and crannies of buildings
on campus. By the time this piece is published, the weather will have changed.
Most of the snow will be melted, and the change to spring will be well
underway. The Christian church, too, celebrates perhaps the biggest change of
all in this season, the shift from the mourning and repentance of Lent to the
joy and exhilaration of Easter.

This
season of change is an appropriate time to reflect on the changes facing higher
education. There is no question that higher education in the United States is
changing, a change that is seen in everything from the kinds of colleges that
students attend to what they study to how they pay for their classes. In his
book The Marketplace of Ideas (2010), Louis Menand,
an English professor at Harvard, examines the tension between the
­nineteenth-century model of the American university and the realities of
twenty-first century life. He writes, “The American university is a product of
the nineteenth century, and it has changed very little structurally since the
time of the First World War. It has changed in many other ways—demographically,
intellectually, financially, technologically, and in terms of its missions, its
stakeholders, and its scale—and these changes have affected the substance of
teaching and research” (17). Menand’s analysis situates the university between
change and constancy and highlights how it is vital for institutions of higher
learning to recognize and respond to these conflicting forces.

Given
the changes facing American higher education as a whole, it should come as no
surprise then, that the relationship between religion and higher education is
changing as well. In fact, all of the finalists for the 2013 Lilly Fellows
Program Book Award have the theme of change at their heart. This change
manifests itself in different ways in each volume; while some of the books consider
personal transitions, others document global shifts in philosophy and theology.
Yet the idea of change itself remains a constant, a reminder that we all
perhaps are, in the words of Christian Smith and Patricia Snell, “souls in
transition.”

One
of the most apparent and immediately recognizable changes these volumes address
is the shift in the way religion both is treated by and affects institutions of
higher learning. In No Longer Invisible: Religion in
University Education, Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen argue
not only that religion is playing a more prominent role in American higher
education in the twenty-first century, but also that the role it plays today is
more complex than it once was. As a result, they claim, we need to ask better questions
than simply, “[H]ow does religion connect to higher education?” (46). After
laying the groundwork for these initial claims, the Jacobsens proceed to
highlight key intersections between religion and higher education that have the
potential to provide those involved in American higher education with the
foundation for asking more thoughtful questions and, as a result, uncovering
more nuanced answers.

Using
a series of anecdotes from their survey of a wide variety of colleges and
universities, the Jacobsens identify six sites of overlap between higher
education and religion: religious literacy, interfaith etiquette, the framing
of knowledge, civic engagement, conviction, and vocation. With its broad
examination of these issues, No Longer Invisible functions
as a survey of many of the interesting and provocative trends seen in higher
education and provides a helpful introduction to the current state of religion
in higher education. Furthermore, the Jacobsens’ study points not only to ways
in which those involved in higher education can ask more thoughtful questions,
but also to possible areas of future inquiry. For instance, in the chapter on
religious literacy, the Jacobsens provide the example of how some white male
Christian professors felt they did such a good job of presenting various
religions that “their students became convinced they were followers of those
religions.” Women scholars and scholars of color, however, “questioned whether
anyone could be quite so neutral or convincing when teaching about another
religion” (67). This anecdote highlights religious literacy as a way to enable
students and faculty to engage more completely with others’ religious beliefs,
but also points to relationships between religion, education, and forms of
difference such as race and gender as valuable avenues of future inquiry. No Longer Invisible succeeds in its goals of offering up
new questions about religion in higher education that are sensitive to the
complexities of the twenty-first century and providing a valuable foundation
for future works that will examine similar trends.

Susan
VanZanten’s book, Joining the Mission: A Guide for (Mainly)
New College Faculty, examines the theme of change and transition but
focuses on the individual faculty member, rather than on the American
university writ large. VanZanten’s book joins the crowd of recent publications
for new faculty members; however, her guide is more specifically targeted to
faculty beginning work at mission-driven institutions. Even with this focus,
much of VanZanten’s advice would be useful for any new faculty member. Her
second chapter, for example, provides a very useful “brief history of Western
higher education,” and she makes a number of very specific suggestions about
incorporating group work into the classroom, both of which would be helpful for
graduate students and new faculty members at any institution.

Yet
what truly sets VanZanten’s volume apart from other new faculty guides is its
exploration of vocation. In the final chapter, entitled “Composing a Life:
Balance and Improvisation,” VanZanten writes, “One of the most pressing
­concerns I regularly hear from emerging faculty is how they can lead a
balanced life…. How can you be a superb teacher, a productive scholar, and an
involved academic citizen, and maintain your sanity? How can you balance your
personal and your professional life[?]” (190). In the rest of the chapter,
VanZanten’s advice calls to mind Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The
Sabbath (1951)
as she offers suggestions for creating rhythm within life that can help faculty
resist becoming overwhelmed by the tasks of everyday life. By giving her
readers room at the end of the volume to breathe and consider the framework for
understanding their chosen careers, VanZanten creates a volume that can be
useful both for those faculty members just embarking upon their careers, as
well as those who are pausing mid-stream to consider the trajectory of their
lives and their vocations.

While
VanZanten’s work focuses on the process of change within an individual faculty
member upon arriving at a mission-driven ­institution, Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution
Secularized Society moves in the opposite direction, examining how the
Reformation affected change in nearly every aspect of society. Gregory’s
analysis of how the Reformation shaped and continues to influence today’s
society is a tour-de-force of both religious and intellectual history. He makes
fascinating and well-supported claims about how the worldview introduced by the
Reformation affects a wide range of social forces and issues, including
capitalism, higher education, and even global warming.

Gregory
adopts a genealogical approach in which he traces the shift in thinking
throughout the history of six particular aspects of society. In Chapter 1,
“Excluding God,” Gregory makes the claim that the Reformation, rather than
science, is what eventually led to the exclusion of God from the examination of
the natural world. He writes, “[T]he intractable doctrinal disagreements among
Protestants and especially between Catholics and Protestants, as we shall see,
had the unintended effect of sidelining explicitly Christian claims about God
in relationship to the natural world. This left only empirical observation and
philosophical speculation as supra-confessional means of investigating and
theorizing that relationship” (40). Gregory then traces the effects of this
doctrinal fragmentation and marginalization of Christian doctrine in the
sciences “through deism to Weberian disenchantment and modern atheism” (41),
showing how such a shift continues to affect society today.

In
later chapters, Gregory examines how similar transformations took place in the
academy as well as in politics, noting:

The doctrinal
disagreements of the Reformation era precipitated the confessionalization of
universities and thus comprised a critical shift in higher education that led
to the eventual secularization of knowledge, and to the modern exclusion of all
religious truth claims not only from the natural sciences, but also from the
social sciences and humanities. A separation of religion from academic
disciplines in secular universities was constructed that now parallels the
institutional separation of church and state. (297)

Here,
Gregory is making a similar claim to his argument about the shift in thinking
about the natural world. While he leads his readers through a dizzying thread
of examples that support such claims, Gregory maintains a tight overall focus.
Given the scope of this study, The Unintended Reformation
will be appealing to a wide range of scholars, even though Gregory’s
methodology is clearly that of a historian. And while he incorporates ideas
from thinkers ranging from Machiavelli to Foucault, he takes care to make these
more theoretical concepts understandable to those outside the academy. As a
result, the threads of change that are traced throughout The
Unintended Reformation are easy to connect to contemporary life,
providing a useful paradigm for understanding the fragmentation of knowledge,
power, and morality in the twenty-first century.

While
Gregory’s study of change is by far the largest in scope out of these four
volumes, Mark Noll’s Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind,
the winner of the 2013 Lilly Fellows Program Book Award, examines a shift that
is perhaps the most hopeful for those in Christian higher ­education. Twenty
years ago, Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
(1994) provocatively began, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there
is not much of an evangelical mind” (3). In this most recent work, Noll opens
very differently: “Christianity is defined by the person and work of Jesus
Christ” (ix). The shift in focus here is immediately clear. While both works
examine aspects of the Christian intellectual tradition, The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind looks at the intellectual tradition of
the Evangelical community, while Jesus Christ and the Life
of the Mind is centered on the teachings and work of Christ himself.
This shift in focus reflects Noll’s overall change in attitude toward the
relationship between the Evangelical mind and intellectual life. As he himself
notes, if had had written The Scandal of the Evangelical
Mind today, “it would have a different tone—more hopeful than
despairing, more attuned to possibilities than to problems, more concerned with
theological resources than with theological ­deficiencies” (153). Noll’s turn
toward a more faith-based approach to Christian scholarship is accompanied
then, by a turn toward hope as well.

Throughout
Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, Noll focuses
on the actual beliefs and practices of Christianity. Rather than turning to
scholars of intellectual history, philosophy, or higher education to make his
claims, Noll instead turns to the Bible, along with theological writings and
the major creeds. When making a claim about how the doctrine of Jesus as both
human and God makes Christian scholars “predisposed to seek knowledge about
particular matters from more than one angle,” Noll turns to Acts 2:23, Nehemiah
2:8, and Psalms 77:19 to illustrate the “wisdom of that expectation” (46). He
then examines the writings of four theologians—Anselm of Canterbury, Benjamin
Warfield, Gabriel Fackre, and Michael Polanyi—to support the idea that while
“the natural human urge moves to adjudicate competition among overarching
claims,” for the Christian scholar who is used to the tension between Christ as
God and Christ as human, “it will be a smaller step… to seek the harmonious
acceptance of [some dichotomous intellectual problems]” (49). Noll maintains
his focus on “the person and work of Jesus Christ” in the development of both
particular claims and his overall argument throughout the volume.

Noll’s
argument in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind
might, initially, seem like something that has been said before. “The great
hope for Christian learning,” he writes, “is to delve deeper into the Christian
faith itself” (22). At first, this claim might not seem to offer anything new.
In fact, it could seem rather limiting: how can one be a Christian scholar of
modernist literature, for instance, if one is focused on the teachings of
Christianity?

As
it turns out, Noll advocates delving deeper into the Christian faith to inform
the process of scholarship, rather than the subject.
In his discussion of “contingency” in Chapter 3 (and later in Chapter 6), for
example, Noll takes Jesus’ charge to “come and see” as a call not just for the
original disciples, but also for academic scholars: “It provides an especially
strong counter to the tendency of academics to trust their own conclusions
instead of letting their ideas be challenged by contact with the world beyond
their own minds” (55). He also identifies Christian faith as an antidote for
the many temptations that come with an academic vocation: “pride to be
cultivated in degrees earned, books published, honors bestowed, or interviews
granted” and “callousness toward people of ­ordinary intelligence” to name two
(61). Because of the emphasis on mystery in the Christian faith, however, Christian
scholars “should be doubly aware of how limited their own wisdom is” (62).
Noll’s charge to “delve deeper into the Christian faith” is not because key
elements of the Christian faith are what Christian
scholars should research, but rather, because they inform how
Christian scholars can engage with their respective disciplines.

After
examining how the Christian faith can encourage virtues such as contingency and
self-denial that are beneficial to scholarship, Noll then spends several
chapters demonstrating how this process would work in particular academic
disciplines. In Chapter 5, he begins with his own discipline—history—arguing
that the limits of knowledge within Christian
thought “provide some reassurance about the potential for grasping actual historical
fact” (84). He expands his discussion of the importance of “coming and seeing”
in Chapter 6 in his discussion of scientific disciplines, pointing out how a
Christ-centered approach to scholarship can be useful in “humbly” and
“nondefensively” tackling difficult questions such as those about evolution and
the origins of the universe (121). Finally, in chapter 7, Noll approaches
Biblical studies, arguing that “[f]or a truly biblical view of the Bible, it is
important not to treat the Bible as a storehouse of information sufficient in
itself for all things but to embrace, rather, the Bible’s own perspective that
leads its readers to a God-ordained openness to all things” (129–130). These
case studies leave much room for academics outside of these three disciplines
to engage with his ideas and consider how their own particular disciplines
might be affected by a Christ-centered approach to scholarship. In this way, by
­exploring how Jesus’ teachings can be applied to several disciplines, Noll
makes a strong case for defining Christian scholarship as an attitude and
approach that can inform the study of nearly anything.

As
a result, Noll’s book is an extremely useful answer to the question, “What does
it mean to be a Christian scholar?” Not only does it provide a concrete answer
to this oft-discussed but seldom answered question, but it makes a strong
argument for why being a Christian scholar can
actually strengthen the quality of research and inquiry, rather than limit it.
The fact that this book is addressed to individual scholars, rather than
addressing larger issues of the university or society, adds further value to
Noll’s claims. It provides concrete suggestions for Christian scholarship that
can be acted upon immediately, rather than pointing to larger trends that seem
out of reach for individuals to address.

Ultimately,
in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, Noll does
more than describe changes seen in society or in the academy. He provides his
readers, whether they are Christian scholars, scholars at faith-based
universities, or engaged readers outside the academy, with ways of
understanding how they fit into these larger patterns of change, and even more
importantly, with ways of making this change their own.

Jennifer Miller teaches English at Normandale Community College in
Minneapolis, Minnesota.